David Smith, the CEO of conservative propaganda syndicate Sinclair Broadcasting, has been funding a lawsuit against Baltimore City schools his local stations are covering extensively without any notice that the stations’ owner is responsible for the case, the Baltimore Banner reports.

As the Baltimore Banner notes, Smith’s Sinclair-owned WBFF Fox 45 in Baltimore spotlights various issues concerning city schools but recently an activist named Jovani Patterson filed a lawsuit against Baltimore’s school system claiming the system was defrauding taxpayers by receiving money for “ghost students” who are listed on school rolls but don’t attend class.

A frequent stand-in for Smith in legal suits, Patterson claims a massive problem of “ghost students” in Baltimore City schools are defrauding taxpayers of millions of dollars.  An audit of five years’ of attendance records by the Maryland Office of the Inspector General, however, found the incidence of counting students who are not in attendance happens with about 0.3% of pupils daily, or around 220 students in the 78,000 student system.

Smith is known for muckraking in Baltimore.  His position as the owner of Sinclair Broadcasting allows him to command what airs on 294 television stations in 89 markets, and his recent purchase of the Baltimore Sun has many skeptical about the integrity of the newspaper’s reporting.

“Take any school in Baltimore City and assume this is going on.  They have kids who are not in class, yet they tell the state government this is how many kids we have in class,” Smith said in a Sun newsroom address after taking over the newspaper, mirroring language used by Patterson in his suit.  “And guess what, they get money for that, even though there’s no kids in the class. That’s called fraud last time I looked.”

Contacted by the Banner, a spokesperson for Sinclair said no one at WBFF knew of Smith’s sponsoring the lawsuit about which they were reporting, an apparent effort to obscure the promotion of an issue its owner is trying to push.